Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Pluto’s going to be very damned good. I think he’s having fun with the whole affair. I was a little apprehensive about how he was going to get along with Sophie, and it’s possible there will be problems when they do scenes that call for more interaction. The outdoor stuff was all silent. Well, they would deliver lines, but we didn’t bother recording them. Afterward we’ll get them into a sound studio and have them loop the out-of-doors dialogue. That’s a movie biz term meaning you lip-synch stuff that is not worth the trouble of recording out of doors. I just learned the term today, and I’m delighted at this opportunity to show it off.

  • • •

  Now might be a good time to say a few words about Pluto, especially in view of the fact that there’s not much I feel like saying about today’s shooting. It was all fairly interesting to me, but I can’t see how it would be too interesting to read about. We might as well have been filming a documentary on jaywalking for all the sexiness of today’s schedule.

  It’s hard to keep calling Pluto Pluto because I know him well under another name, the one he was born with. I’ve known him for years, although not intimately. He’s been a professional stage actor for maybe fifteen years, ever since he got out of college, and on the basis of his vocational experience I have decided that, if I ever have a kid who wants to become a professional stage actor, I am going to throw acid in his face and treat him to a correspondence course in television repair.

  Pluto is out of work maybe two-thirds of the time in a good year. Not because he’s incompetent but because that’s the nature of the business. And when he does work he doesn’t really make much more money than when he doesn’t. The closest he’s come to real success was a couple of years ago when he took over the lead in an off-Broadway hit. He was in the show for a couple of months. It represented the fruits of a dozen years of struggle. All his friends came to see him.

  He took home something like eighty-three bucks a week for his pains.

  Incredible, isn’t it? When you’re an actor, the difference between working and not working is that you have a little less time at your disposal when you’re working. And not much more money.

  I wrote the part of Pluto with him in mind. At the time I didn’t know whether he would want to do it or not, but I kept hearing him speaking the lines in my mind and that’s always good; it’s easier to keep any character’s lines consistent if you can hear a well-defined voice speaking them in your head. The concept of the Pluto character as a nonsexual role was a nice one. Alan’s, I believe. He felt it was important to have some competent acting in the production, and that we would have a much easier time of finding competent actors if they did not have to be competent studs as well.

  From my point of view, the nonsexual actors were a big help. The Madge-Pluto scenes in particular were a joy to write, since I was able to assume that the two of them would be able to read their lines with some flair. Elsewhere it was necessary to make the dialogue as actor-proof as possible. If you’ve seen even a few hardcore films, you know what the average level of acting is like. You can’t write lines that depend upon subtle timing or clever inflection for some twit who couldn’t get a walk-on with the Paper Bag Players of East Jesus, Kansas.

  We signed Pluto a month ago. Vinnie and Alan took my word for it that he would be perfect. Then I called him up and made an appointment to see him.

  He lives in the Village. I trotted down there, script in hand, and accepted a drink. We small talked for a minute or two. Then I rather lurchingly explained that I was involved in, uh, well, the production of, uh, a hardcore film, and that there was a nonscrewing part that was just right for him, that it had, in fact, been written with him in mind, and that, uh, well, would he mind having a look at it?

  He read maybe ten pages of script and looked up. “Do I have to read any more of this?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I mean, is it necessary?”

  I took this to mean that he thought the script sucked, that nothing would persuade him to lower himself to this filth, and that he thought very little of me for wasting his time.

  “Because there’s no point in reading it now,” he went on. “Of course I’ll do it. Christ, a hundred dollars a day. How many days’ work do you think it’ll amount to?”

  “Around a week,” I said. “I think.”

  “Incredible,” he said. “A hundred dollars a day. Do I have to audition for it?”

  “You just did. Successfully.”

  “The director?”

  “He relies on my judgment.”

  He filled our glasses. “I suppose I should think about the implications of appearing in a pornographic movie,” he said. “But fuck that. For a hundred dollars a day I would screw a chimpanzee in the Felt Forum. For a hundred dollars a day I would bite the heads off chickens. You know that story, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “About the guy in the carnival, they call them geeks, and this geek, his shtick is to put a live rat between two slices of rye bread.”

  “I know the story.”

  “So you’re shooting this when?” I told him. “And that’s it? I’ve got the part just like that?”

  I went over and picked up his phone. I called Alan. “My guy just gave me a reading on the Pluto role,” I said. “He’s slightly perfect and he likes the script.” (I took the opportunity to invent a few things he liked about the script. Around about this time I was picking up support wherever possible. Nothing helped Alan find an opinion like the opinion of somebody else, and I needed all the help I could get to circumvent his ideas for changes. Alan, my manicurist loves the Rasputin song. Alan, the Chicken Delight delivery boy read the cabaret scene and laughed his head off. Alan, the blind beggar who works 7th Avenue in the Forties thinks the Satan ending is both philosophically sound and artistically effective.)

  “Then he’ll do it?”

  Alan sounded hooked, which made me decide to push. I said, “The only hassle is money. I told him one and a quarter and a guarantee of five days, and he thought one-fifty and a guarantee of seven days sounded more like it. Now I think he may be fairly flexible but I don’t want to lose him. How much room do I have to play with?”

  Pluto’s getting one-forty a day, six days guaranteed.

  He has a nice quality on the basis of what we shot today, which isn’t much of a basis. There’s something vaguely evocative of Bogart in his manner. I know he played the Bogart character in a couple of road company productions of Play it Again, Sam. I think I suggested he lean that way in his scenes without getting into actual imitation.

  I wonder how the interplay of him and Sophie will come across on the screen. He has a lot more presence than she does, but that won’t necessarily mean that he’ll make her look ineffective. As far as his effect on her performance, it could go either way. She might feel outclassed and respond by tightening up, or she might give a better performance than usual because she’s stimulated by his professionalism.

  Oh, for Christ’s sake.

  I’m beginning to feel like Vinnie. After all, what the hell difference does it make? Nobody is going to give a damn if Sophie reads her lines imaginatively. I told Vinnie they aren’t going to show this at Cannes. It’s something I’d better not let myself forget.

  You really shouldn’t lose sight of what it is you’re creating, whether it’s a porno film or anything else. There’s a line, I think I heard it attributed to Billy Wilder, to the effect that nobody ever turned to his friend and said, “Hey, let’s go down to the Criterion; there’s a film there that came in at fifty thou under budget.” Well, nobody ever paid five bucks to sit in a smelly grind house because he heard the leading lady studied under Lee Strasberg.

  Nevertheless, there’s a certain amount of doublethink necessary if you’re going to do a good job. On the one hand you have to realize the basic nature of your product, because if you don’t you’ll wind up failing to emphasize what has to be emphasized. On the other hand, you have to aspire to something better than the
market demands, you have to come very close to believing that a special exercise of craft and artistry is necessary, or you’ll produce a poorer film than you would otherwise.

  A question of balance, I guess. When we tend to slide through things, I’ll remind myself that it wasn’t our purpose to produce a run-of-the-mill fuck film, that we wanted to take some steps to transcend the limitations of the genre. And when I find myself getting a little on the artsy-fartsy side, I’ll force myself to remember that this is, in the final analysis, a film in which a girl is going to get her box eaten by a pedigreed Old English sheepdog.

  Won’t Mother be proud. My Son the Filmmaker.

  • • •

  One thing that’s very odd, and is going to continue to be odd, is this finger-snapping business of Pluto’s. It should work well enough in the finished film, because we’ll have special effects edited in: the puff of smoke, the explosion, whatever. But we have to shoot without all that, naturally, and that makes it slightly weird. Pluto snaps his fingers, and nothing happens, and Sophie has to react as if something has happened.

  That only really entered into one scene in today’s shooting. It’s the outdoor sequence in which Sophie and Pluto spot a guy waiting for the light to change, and the guy is tapping his foot, and Pluto snaps his fingers, and magically a pile of doggie-do materializes under the guy’s foot, and he taps his foot in it, and gets disgusted and wipes his foot off vigorously.

  That’s one of Vinnie’s notions and I didn’t even try to talk him out of it because I decided I liked it. We shot it today with Alan the Producer as the man who steps in shit. Alan had not intended to be in the picture, aside from occupying space in a couple of crowd scenes, but I suggested him for this role. I said it could be his trademark, like Hitchcock. In every picture he makes, I suggested, Alan could step in shit.

  First we did the footage with Sophie and Pluto from a couple of angles, Pluto’s facial takes, his finger-snap, the reactions and nods of satisfaction. Then we set up on Alan, first tapping on the sidewalk, then tapping in dogshit. He actually suggested that we go to one of those Broadway novelty shops and buy one of those plastic dog turds. Vinnie and I both screamed at him that the scene demanded realism.

  I was deputized to find the dog crap. This was not hard. You can’t walk a block in Manhattan without finding enough to fertilize the Sahara. I entered into the spirit of the thing and came back with a mountain of the stuff, evidently the product of several different dogs. Several different large dogs. We got Alan back in position, placed the mountain of crap, and filmed it.

  Don’t you know, he needed two takes? The dumb son of a bitch tapped very tentatively the first time around, as if he knew the crap was there. Vinnie called him on this and we made him do it over, and this time he did literally what he has been doing figuratively all his life, and as usual he did not come up smelling like a rose.

  He gave a very authentic performance scraping his shoe on the curb, let me tell you. Long after the camera stopped rolling he was still scraping like a maniac.

  We shot this on the corner of Lex and 62nd or 63rd around three-thirty in the afternoon. The street was not very crowded but a batch of Bloomingdale’s shoppers stood around watching. I think the bit will be very nice on the screen, but I’d much rather have a film of the whole overview, all those people with shopping bags watching earnestly as Our Hero steps in it. I’d really like that.

  • • •

  I’m not too happy with the objet d’art.

  It’s a vaguely Aladdin-type lamp that Alan picked up somewhere, with a clay penis grafted onto it, and it looks dopey. I still think we would be better off getting a cherub and dramatically increasing the size of its phallus, but Alan is very keen on the lamp. He doesn’t want anyone to miss the mythic implications. Also, he went out and bought the lamp. That’s one real problem in any collective effort, the ego factor; whenever anybody here comes up with an idea, they fall in love with it. I’m sure I do the same thing myself.

  In fact, it’s possible that what I don’t like about the lamp is that Alan loves it.

  We had to shoot the lamp today, since Sophie carries it from the auction gallery through the streets to her apartment. I suggested she carry it wrapped, so that we would leave ourselves room to change our minds later on, but I was outvoted. This made the filming process a little more interesting, as people on the street tended to stare at this old oil lamp with a cock attached to it.

  I would only have bought us a day anyway. Tomorrow we do interior stuff at Alan’s apartment, and the lamp will be prominently on display throughout, from the opening shot of her placing it on a shelf to the closing shot of her chucking it in the garbage.

  • • •

  I didn’t have a hell of a lot to do today. A week of days like this one would be a long one. In a way I’m very much looking forward to the sex scenes. In another way I’m not.

  We did one thing right today, anyway. When Vinnie worked up the shooting schedule, he remembered that Sophie would have a major makeup change. In the precredit sequence, she’s made up as an old bag. In the rest of the stuff she’s her natural self. So we put her into makeup at the beginning and did all the precredit exterior shots at once before bringing her back to youthfulness and shooting the rest of the stuff.

  This makeup switching is a pain in the ass. And we’re not done with it. The problem, of course, is going to be getting it the same each time. A lot of the age is done with acting, and Sophie is surprisingly good at that. She lets her shoulders slump, rolls her hip when she strides, etc. She also pads herself around the chest and middle to suggest a more mature figure.

  The makeup doesn’t really make her look fifty, but it helps. I won’t know how well it works until I see some film, which will be after we’re done.

  It would be nice to do all the old stuff at once, so that we don’t have to redo Sophie each time. But that would mean moving around too much geographically. For instance, tomorrow we’ll shoot stuff at Alan’s apartment, both before and after our girl’s transformation. And some other day we’ll shoot the singles’ bar scene, in which Pluto transforms her from an old bag to a young knockout. It’s a shame, but there’s really no way around it.

  There will be one other transformation, the flashback sequence in which Sophie is magically turned twelve years old again. That will be my turn in the barrel, my dramatic debut as the Dirty Old Man. But we’ll only have to do the makeup once. That will be the last day of shooting, for reasons I won’t go into just yet, if you don’t mind, and we’ll shoot the outdoor and the indoor one after the other.

  Which reminds me. When Pluto read those ten pages of script the first day, we rapped about the difference between doing a hardcore scene and simply being in a hardcore picture. He said he probably wouldn’t do a hardcore scene (assuming he would be capable of it, which he suspected he would not). He said he wasn’t sure why he wouldn’t want to ball someone on camera but that was his immediate reaction. On the other hand, he had no compunctions about appearing in the film in the Pluto role.

  In this connection I mentioned that I was going to be playing a sexually active role in the film, and told him what the role was. The Dirty Old Man scene, of course, was in the first ten pages of script, so he was familiar with it.

  “God,” he said, “even in films like this you can’t get away from typecasting.”

  —Friday

  The Irving character was Vinnie’s idea, and Vinnie wrote most of Irving’s dialogue. From the beginning, Vinnie has worried that the script is going to play too short. He certainly knows more than I do about timing a script, but I think he’s crazy. I gave it a rough reading for timing a while ago and it came out to almost two hours. What we want is somewhere between eighty and ninety minutes. It’s possible that I’m expecting the sex scenes to run longer than they ultimately will.

  In any case, Vinnie would rather come in long than short which makes excellent sense, as it’s easier to cut than to stretch. There’s another reason
for this. Vinnie wants to be able to edit a soft-core version of the film for markets where hardcore films can’t be shown. Drive-ins, for instance. You just can’t show hardcore movies at drive-ins or passersby will start driving into one another.

  (Incidentally, Alan was telling me that this is changing. He read in one of the trades that some farsighted exhibitor in, I think, western Pennsylvania is enclosing his drive-in theater with a huge wall so that he can show hardcore films there. That’s enterprise, all right. Though I can’t understand why anyone would want to watch a hardcore film at a drive-in. If that’s where your interests lie, isn’t it just as easy to watch the people in the other cars? What you lose in professionalism you surely make up in spontaneity and enthusiasm.)

  This idea of cutting a soft-core version is not without merit, though, and something I would never have thought of. So in this sense Vinnie is perfectly right. By making sure we have as much extrasexual material as possible, and by cutting out the cock-and-cunt shots from the sex scenes, we can produce something that will be, while obviously X-rated, safe from censorship in those areas where an all out hardcore film can’t play.

  Which brings us back to Irving.

  The main trouble with Irving is the character who plays him. I met him for the first time today and my immediate reaction was a delighted one. He looks the part to perfection. A real foxy grandpa-type, fifty-five or sixty, a dealer in rare coins and stamps, snow white hair, waxed moustache, hell, the son of a bitch is the perfect Irving.

  The son of a bitch is not the perfect actor, however.

  Not even close.

  He’s a backer, with a thou or two invested in the film, and he’s very happy to supply his acting services free of charge, which certainly makes him a bargain. But he made a perfect hash out of today’s shooting. He came along with his own wardrobe, with costume changes for each appearance, and he was as eager as could be, and he had his lines committed to memory perfectly, and then we tried a run-through of the first scene, where he meets Sophie in the hallway, and I realized we were in for trouble. I caught a glimpse of Pluto’s face when Irving said his lines. He looked as though he had just swallowed a bad oyster.